ESpeak, with voices in several languages (https://sourceforge.net/projects/espeak/)
Hi Jochen,
Thanks, it looks like an interesting and useful tool.
Hi Erol,
The quality of the voices is not overwhelming, but there are some in languages that Micros*t doesn't give us for free.
JJ,
See if this sounds OK. Its "pay for" software, a product called "Talkia". I copied a short piece of German poetry and fed it through a voice that is supposed to speak German and to my very uneducated ear for DE speech, it sounds something like spoken German.
Talkia is classes better, of course. How much did you pay for it?
I just checked and they no longer have a single price option. The ones that I have seen use either Amazon Polly or Google Wavenet but there are other techniques to access these, download a toy called Balabolka which can do the SAPI5 voices you can load onto your computer but you can also access online TTS and some of these are very good.
It seems Balabolka (http://www.cross-plus-a.com/bfaq.htm) itself does not have new voices, but here are some (http://www.zero2000.com/free-text-to-speech-natural-voices.html).
It will do both SAPI5 voices and onlines voices from a number of sources. If you go to "Tools" then online services, you get another window that has a number of online sites. You type in the text, hit save and wait for the online TTS to finish. Some of these are very good.
With SAPI5 you have to mess around with window control panel and enable multiple languages, but some of the later M$ voices are a lot better than the old ones.
Voices is fun to play with if you want to test japanese voice read swedish text sound like read with Japanese accent
I like learn foreign Asian languages, download and install Chinese and Japanese language pack also comes with some japanese and Chinese voices beside install unicode characters